Author: joell

The number one leadership factor is:” “Calm is Contagious” says former Navy SEAL commander Rourke Davis.

Imagine that?  Coming from a Navy SEAL – talking about leadership and he  sounds like a neo-buddhist hippy.

Calm is Contagious –  leadership advice.

Yesterday, a family came to the barn. The son is 18. He’s limited verbally and gifted physically. He loves riding horses, he loves waterskiing, swimming and snow skiing.

I was chatting with mom about their awesome ski trip while her son went with his favorite instructor grooming his horse. Mom and I were interrupted by her son yelling loudly and rushing toward us. His face was red and tears were running down both cheeks.

In hopes to help regulate her son, mom calmly showed him her phone with a visual schedule, she asked him to sit and we all did some simple breathing activities. After a few minutes, mom asked if he was ready to go back to his horse, he said yes and walked back to the horse.

A minute later, the same thing happened. He was seriously dis-regulated. His crying was real and he couldn’t tell us what was the matter. We asked him if he wanted to ride and he said he didn’t.  We told mom to go and get her helmet and that she could ride instead. This both excited and terrified mom but she’s as game as they come – autism moms are a tough bunch.

I took her son to the arena and we played his favorite music. He was fond of a country song, particularly of one phrase from the ditty where the singer crooned “I’ve got to pull myself together.”  He played it over and over and over.  Behaviors are communication folks.

The music played.

“I’ve got to pull myself

                  Pull myself

                  Pull myself

                  Pull myself together”   Over and over.

Mom was mounting the horse and like a lightning bolt, her son rushed at her, screaming, crying and reaching for her hair to pull.  I knew I couldn’t make it there before him so I shouted “incoming” to give the instructor, mom and the horse a heads up.

Mom was able to get off the horse and got her son to sit on the ground and told him clearly that rushing the horse and grabbing her hair was not acceptable – ever.

Disaster averted.

We decided to sit quietly with him as he skimmed through his music selection with the horse still close. We talked about life, weather and horses.  Mom brought the horse treats and we giggled at the horse’s lovely face.

We realized that the son was simply exhausted. The excitement of skiing, the drive home – it was a lot. He was not rested and therefore had no resilience available.  Mom also had been up late with him and she, like mothers have always done, put her weariness on hold and handled the day. The best thing we could do was to offer a safe and quiet space for both.

Mom sent us a photo 20 minutes after leaving – her son sound asleep in the back of the car. 

“Calm is contagious.”

Calm made the difference. Mom stayed safe, her son regulated. Calm is what turned a potential meltdown into a chance to find a space to rest. Calm kept the horse from reacting badly. Pedigree geeks in racing will note that the horse is a son of the mighty Fusiachi Pegasus, winner of the 2000 Kentucky Derby. He never wavered. Why?  Because Calm is Contagious.

Calm is valued and cultivated here – it’s how we help each other.

Watch the best horsemen in the world, no matter what the discipline and there’s  one uniting factor – Calm.

If we can help and support a tired autism family to cultivate calm – and find connection –  we have served our community.

There you have it – what’s good for Navy SEALs, world class horsemen, neo-buddhist hippies and us – is Calm and luckily, it’s contagious.

Now I’m going to try to take my own advice, put on some mud boots and deal with a broken water pipe in a muddy horse corral.

Peace out.

 

Blogger Davis Finch finds his voice and his truth in writing another thoughtful piece for the Square Peg website.

 

Horses are prey animals; they are constantly in fear of a predator that wants to eat them.  I have had bad anxiety all my life. Often I feel like a prey animal.  Like horses, I am big and could subdue most would be attackers but, also like horses, I still fear attack from a stronger force that I cannot subdue.  Horses fear of real predators such as mountain lions and coyotes has been an evolutionary necessity for them.  They also have irrational fears of harmless things such as floating plastic bags, tarps blowing in the wind, and poles on the ground.  

My anxiety has likely helped me by tempering my curiosity but can also result in persistent negative thoughts about confinement or death.  It is funny how I kept worrying about farfetched sources of harm but didn’t think to check where my dog was when I ran through the house in the middle of the night (I had a very bad fall).  Similarly, a horse could be freaking out about puddles and shadows but not colic and pasture accidents.

I guess we all have fears both rational and irrational.  Good horsemanship is earning the trust of a horse so he will follow you over his instinctual fears.  Maybe we humans can learn something from that?  Maybe if I can trust myself, I too can overcome my innate fears.  I know I have abnormally high anxiety, but perhaps those feelings of trust and fear are true for most people.  Perhaps, even though we can hunt and eat meat, humans are innately prey animals too.

 

Last night, in the safety of our living room, 15 or so of us gathered for Salon.

Historically, Salons were called by fashionable women who would invite intellectuals to their house for a party to discuss heavy topics.  It was a way that women could participate in discussions of policy and philosophy in an informal setting with good food and drink.

Here at Square Peg, Darius and I started hosting Salon to bring people together to dive deeper into complicated subjects in a respectful setting that felt more like a warm gathering of friends than in a “town hall” type setting.

But something magic happened. Our youth commandeered our California take on a cocktail party. They found Salon as a safe and welcoming space to be seen and heard – to listen and formulate opinions and share deep thoughts and experiences.

My job changed from making sure that there was stylish food to offer to gently drawing out those who have not felt safe enough to have their thoughts heard in a group. Salon is now more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

Last night, we talked about community.  We spent a good amount of time defining what a community is – is it a space with a common interest as vague as a video game or as deep as blood ties. The answer, we decided, was yes to both. We talked about the community of being a sports team fan and how that community because it had a cause and a mission (to beat the other team) could bring out excitement, but also violence. We talked about whether of not a virtual community, gleaned via the internet was a real community and how the pain of a shared experience can bring out the best of us in the uncharted waters known as compassion and empathy.

We started to explore how a community, at some point, has to develop rules to keep things fair, especially when resources become or perceive to become more scarce and that naturally led us to wrap up the night as we all agreed that the next monthly Salon be on the nature of Policy and hence, Politics. We agreed that we would do the best we all could not to get pulled into a divisive discussion of current politics and instead, think about how different political systems evolved and how one system might work for one community and not for another.

Pretty brilliant stuff.

I am grateful for the trust and care that the members of our Square Peg community show to each other in this sweet group.

And I’m wicked grateful for the lovely community that we have all built.

If you are curious, I highly suggest developing a Salon group of your own.  Feel free to email me if you would like advice on how to do it.

I’m back from two days in San Diego having had the honor to present Movement Method to a group of therapists on one day and to a group of autism parents on the other. I was assisted by the brilliant and patient Vanda Richardson who applies these methods to her families daily.

We presented well – we were organized, funny, authentic. We got our audiences to laugh and to cry.

The therapists had great questions, asking for advice with a tricky client or for clarification on a particular point. Parents asked the harder questions:

      “When my child is melting down – what can I do?”

       “How can I stay sane and lean into my daughter’s obsession with her dolls?”

Despite some unexpected technology challenges, it went very well.

But our hostess, Jenny Palmiotto  began receiving texts even during the presentation.

      “But how do we DO Movement Method?” People were eager to know how             they could implement change right now.

It’s a frustration I’ve heard before.

And it’s fair.  If you signed up for a cooking class, you would expect to leave the room with some skills to take home about chopping or choosing a cut of meat, about what temperature to pre-heat the oven and how long to cook the roast.

I never want a parent to leave a session or a training feeling guilty or even more tired.  I want people to take away the information with a feeling of connectedness and a plan to incorporate some laughter and joy and understanding into their interactions with their child or with their clients.

I’ve watched parents take in the Horse Boy film and leave feeling defeated saying “Look, I can’t just go up a mountaintop and take my family to Mongolia.  I guess I’m just not as good a parent as they are.”

And it makes me feel terrible.

Because it’s the opposite of what I was trying to convey – which means I may have failed.

Here’s the thing – parenting or therapy is not cooking.  Cooking has an outcome – delicious and nutritious food that will not make you sick.

Working with anyone with neurological struggles is clearly more complicated. The goal is to help a person become as fully realized as a human as possible.

Movement Method is misnamed. It’s not a Method – it’s a framework. It’s a lens to view behaviors, motivations and the brain science of what is happening.  It’s a lens to understand our own cultural upbringing and how we got to a place where we are applying techniques that don’t work – in fact, they create suffering.

Within this framework, we challenge and invite the therapist, teacher or parent to view a situation or a behavior or a goal through a different lens.

I’ll illustrate.

Let’s say the goal is to get a seven year old ME to eat different foods. I’d chosen for myself what I  call “the beige diet” I liked french fries, oatmeal, chicken nuggets and white bread.  We all know a growing body needs more protein, some greens perhaps.  It’s distressing and oh so common.

My mom was a product of 70’s television and made lots of gooey casseroles that started with cans of Campbell’s soup – the sight of the label makes me ill to this day.

You know how this story plays out. Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me leave the table until I’d finished everything no matter how long it might take. It’s what they were told by the parenting experts. They were excellent parents and they were dedicated.  Ergo – mealtimes were hell for all of us.

They were told that I was the middle child trying to get attention by being  picky and now all the attention was on me. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I just wanted to leave the table and go and play outside – or be left alone in my room to read the books I loved.

Behavior – picky eater

Theory of function of the behavior – attention

Treatment: only offer non preferred foods with no other choices and eventually, survival instinct would kick in and I’d have to eat something at which point there would be much rejoicing and all of my attention getting needs would be met (in reality, I’d just wait until everyone was asleep at night and I’d get up and fix myself a bowl of breakfast cereal)

Stressful, time consuming, ineffective, punishing for the ENTIRE family with long-lasting negative results.

Now, let’s apply a Movement Method lens to the same situation.

What were my intrinsic interests? Outdoor play, reading.

How about we read “Bread and Jam for Frances” by Russell Hoban?  I loved Frances the Badger.  Like me, Frances was kind of dreamy and loved being outdoors. The descriptions of the food in the book are delightful.

By reading a book with me, with a character I could identify with and then just leaving it alone – we could have had a tender and sweet family experience and given me the opportunity to quite literally come to the table on my own INTRINSIC interest – and avoided the compulsory, compliance based approach we were raised with.

Take a moment to recognize that this kinder approach by acknowledging a 7 year old’s interests isn’t some soft-handed hippy work around to make the parents feel superior – it’s just WILDLY MORE EFFECTIVE and more humane for the whole family.

Remember the brain science!  If cortisol, the stress hormone is evolutionarily designed to narrow focus – then your child’s most obsessive interests are an illustration of a stressed mind. The obsessive focus is a symptom of the stress and not the source of the stress.

Only when we are truly seen and accepted for a narrow interest (Frances’ obsession with bread and jam) does it naturally begin to ameliorate.

Our hostess for the trainings Dr. Jenny Palmietto of Family Guidance and Therapy http://www.familyguidanceandtherapy.com 

Had something really beautiful to say. She talked about the “Otherness” of treatment.  Meaning, when you see your clients, students etc as “other” you lose the humanity and thus the effectiveness of treatment.  She illustrated that if it’s a treatment you wouldn’t do with your own children, you need to re-think it.

I would add that we need to further connect it and take a moment to tenderly reflect on our own behaviors as kids and how a compulsory, compliance-based treatment negatively affected us.

Understand that Movement Method is not a tool, it’s not a method, it’s a lens and a reference and an invitation to innovate.  The self compassion portion of MM is pivotal as we struggle to throw off the cultural norm of extrinsic rewards and compliance based systems – not for any other reason than because they do not work.

Take a deep breath, turn on some music, smile and begin by forgiving yourself. Imagine a delightful interaction. Innovate. Explore and don’t forget to laugh.

Let’s turn this post into a discussion.  List a struggle YOU had, the more sensory based, the better and how shifting the lens to how a therapist, teacher or parent could have worked with your intrinsic interests to help you overcome.

Ready? Go!